Two Girls Down

Starred review from October 16, 2017
Best known as a YA author, Luna (Crooked) ventures into adult thriller territory with a real nail-biter. Single mother Jamie Brandt parks in a shopping center in Denville, Pa., leaving her two daughters—10-year-old Kylie and eight-year-old Bailey—in the car while she goes into a Kmart to buy a birthday present. When she returns to the car, the children have disappeared. The devastated Jamie’s take-charge aunt, Maggie Shambley, asks California bounty hunter Alice Vega to locate the girls. The complicated, blunt-talking Alice, who may be on the autism spectrum, has an uncanny knack for finding people. When the Denville police chief rejects Alice’s help, despite being besieged by budget cuts, low morale, and a rising oxycodone and meth epidemic, she teams up with Max Caplan, a disgraced former cop turned PI who knows the local area. Luna nicely charts how the aloof Alice comes to embrace a personal relationship. The brisk plot combines psychological suspense with solid action, while providing a realistic look at a family under siege, as it builds to a shocking finale. Agent: Mark Falkin, Falkin Literary.

What's the audiobook equivalent of a page-turner? That's what narrator Tavia Gilbert delivers in this mystery, in which two girls disappear from a strip mall parking lot. The desperate search for them brings together Max Caplan, a former police detective, now a P.I, and prickly Alice Vega, a bounty hunter who has earned a reputation for finding missing children. They follow leads that go nowhere and then connect the disappearance to other unsolved missing children cases in small-town Pennsylvania. Gilbert demonstrates her skill in voicing men, women and children of widely different backgrounds and is especially effective in expressing the pain of the tortured mothers of the missing girls. Listeners will find it hard to put down their earphones. E.Q. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine